Archive for month: October, 2010

"There’s no disputing that Facebook is the poster child for social networking. It is the platform for building social connections online and keeping up to date with what’s happening in your social circle. It is one of the two most important platforms in social media.

The other one is Twitter. However, if you try to describe Twitter as a “social network” to anyone who works at the company, they’ll quickly correct you. Internally and externally, Twitter describes itself as an “information network.”

https://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.png00Hotel Bloggerhttps://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.pngHotel Blogger2010-10-29 08:00:002010-10-29 08:00:00Facebook, Twitter and The Two Branches of Social Media

"There has been a lot of discussion about social media ROI lately – everyone is pushing very hard to figure out how it can be used to make money or reduce costs. Fundamentally we need to start any investment initiative with the goal of making more or spending less so the ROI conversation is very important. However, as an analyst I often had to chuckle because we hear very little from the companies making a lot of money (with high margins) off of social media and online communitities – companies like The Knot, Match.com, and UTest. Why? Those who have figured out the puzzle have no particular need to share their secrets and in most of the examples I know of they are market disruptors, not established brands."

PARSIPPANY, NJ , October 26, 2010 – Lodging Interactive, an award winning Interactive and Social Media Marketing Agency exclusively servicing the hospitality industry, today announced the introduction of HotelWebPages.com, an innovative way for hotels to establish customized landing pages to capture business from local demand drivers.

“HotelWebPages.com is an innovative new service that enables hotels to position themselves to book business from local demand drivers. HotelWebPages.com is especially effective for branded hotels that do not have a website, yet still want to capture business from the Social, Medical, Educational, Religious and Fraternal (SMERF) markets,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder & President. “HotelWebPages.com will take online shoppers users from the hotel’s custom landing pages directly into the brand’s online booking engine all without the need of a stand-alone website.”

With HotelWebPages.com hotels can aggressively market themselves online to capture incremental business from local and regional demand drivers such as:

“HotelWebPages.com is not a tool that requires the hoteliers to research demand drives or to write their own content. Rather, with HotelWebPages.com we provide a full “turn-key” custom landing page solution for our clients,” added Mr. Vallauri.

The hotelWebPages.com service goes beyond the creation of effective customized landing pages. All custom landing pages are submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing on an ongoing monthly basis. Additionally, each hotel receives a monthly Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) report.

“We recently started using the HotelWebPages.com service and have already started to see our custom landing pages appear on Google. The combination of Lodging Interactive’s keyword research, search engine optimization expertise and technology really does work for us,” stated Ed Reagoso, General Manager of the Wilshire Grand Hotel in West Orange, NJ.

"J.D. Power and Associates recently released its 2010 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study that is based on more than 53,000 guests who stayed in a hotel between May 2009 and June 2010. I am sharing insights on select topics from the study. This article focuses on guest problems.

J.D. Power and Associates continues to observe that high levels of customer satisfaction are dependent on problem prevention, rather than problem resolution. That is not to say that service recovery is not required when a guest experiences a significant problem; however, it is more difficult to achieve the satisfaction level of those guests who don’t experience a problem in the first place, than for guests who experience problems that are eventually resolved."

"Google has been stunningly adept at devising computer algorithms to help people search the Internet. But when it comes to building features for social networking, the company has been much less effective.

And changing that is one of the company’s biggest business challenges these days.

Google depends on having its finger on the pulse of the entire Internet, and maintaining its status as the primary entree to the Web. But as people spend more time on closed social networks like Facebook, where much of the data they share is off limits to search engines, Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising."

https://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.png00Hotel Bloggerhttps://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.pngHotel Blogger2010-10-22 08:00:002010-10-22 08:00:00Google Is Determined to Crack the Social Code

"Online advertising is thriving in the U.S., according to figures released in the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.

Businesses and individuals spent approximately $12.1 billion on online advertising in the first six months of 2010, up 11.3% from the from the first half of 2009 and 13.9% from the second quarter of 2009. In fact, this was both the highest first-half and second-quarter revenue ever recorded."

PARSIPPANY, NJ , October 18, 2010 – Lodging Interactive, an award winning Interactive and Social Media Marketing Agency exclusively servicing the hospitality industry, today announced that it has won multiple WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association’s 14th annual WebAwards Competition for Web site development. More than 2,000 web sites from 45 countries competed in 96 industry categories.

“We are honored to have been awarded such prestigious awards from the Web Marketing Association for our outstanding design work and are pleased to share these awards with our clients,” stated DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder and President.

The competition was judged by a team of independent Internet professionals representing a variety of relevant disciplines of Web site development. Judges included members of the media, advertising executives, site designers, creative directors, corporate marketing executives, content providers and webmasters.

The company on Wednesday introduced a feature that allows users to interact with small groups of people, like their family, high school friends or colleagues.

The move is an effort to address a longstanding problem: Facebook friends often span a broad range of relationships that include relatives, classmates, casual professional acquaintances or jogging partners — and not everyone wants all of them to see his or her information.

With the new feature, called Groups, Facebook hopes to encourage users to upload more photos, videos and other information to the site while giving them new ways to control who sees what."

"Social
networks and microblogs have in recent years nudged blogging off the
social media pedestal. For some consumers, who have more communication
tools at their fingertips than they did a few years ago, Facebook and
Twitter have supplanted blogging as life-streaming outlets.

But blogs continue to be important. eMarketer estimates that this
year more than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly.
By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or
60% of the internet population in the US. One reason for the rise in
readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online
media landscape."

https://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.png00Hotel Bloggerhttps://lodginginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-lodging-interactive-2016dark340.pngHotel Blogger2010-10-13 08:00:002010-10-13 08:00:00The Continued Rise of Blogging - More than half of web users will read blogs this year

"Hoteliers are flocking to embrace social media – some are considering
the strategic aspects but most are taking the “lets just get going, try
it out and see what works” approach. Whilst this is a valid approach for
a concept that is still, after-all, relatively new to business
activities, social media, like all marketing approaches, benefits from
specific strategic planning."